The warrior collapsed, his mouth spurting shiny crimson across his yellow face paint, splattering his chest. He growled back, like a wounded animal, dragging feet under him, preparing to rise.
Taking the rifle barrel in both hands, Hook swung it just as he had battered axes at trees in both the Shenandoah Valley back in Virginia, and on that land he cleared to build a home for Gritta and their children. That quiet, narrow valley back home.
Blood splattered on him as the buttstock cracked against the skull.
The Cheyenne collapsed like a damp lampwick.
Jonah Hook stumbled backward one step, then two. And on the third, he collapsed as the creeping darkness washed over him.
10
August, 1865
“GREAT GOD A’MIGHTY, Jonah—you blooded yourself in this scrap!”
Hook blinked his eyes, things watery at first, then slowly swimming clear. Up there blotting out a big chunk of sky hung Shad Sweete’s gray-bearded face.
“Take ’er easy. Looks of it, you had yourself a real tussle.”
Jonah sat upright with a jerk, wincing at the wounded arm. Near his feet lay a warrior, blood drying on the side of his head and face.
“He dead?”
Sweete smiled. “As dead as he can be. You whacked him hard enough to drive him on into the Other Side.”
“Other Side?”
Sweete poked his hands beneath Hook’s arms. “Where the Cheyenne go when they die. After taking a long walk in Seyan—that star road up overhead in the nightsky.”
His knees felt weak. “Sweet heaven.”
“You got the idea, Jonah.”
“I didn’t mean heaven like that.” He looked at the second warrior lying still, collapsed in the underbrush, a bloody, bluish hole in the middle of his chest.
“Don’t make no difference,” Shad replied.
All around them Hook heard that the shooting had stopped. Replaced now with yelps and laughter, hoots of joy and wild cheering from the Pawnee, who were scattered over every one of the Cheyenne bodies.
“How many we get, Shad?”
“Twenty-four,” he answered. “Every last one of ’em.”
“We … we killed ’em all?”
“And you got two for yourself. They yours—scalps and plunder both.”
“Plunder?”
“Guns, knives—whatever you want off’n the bodies. Along with the hair.”
He glared at Sweete, suddenly angry at something, perhaps the cold knot in his stomach. “Ain’t got no use for the hair.”
“You better let me take it for you then, Jonah,” Sweete said quietly as a half dozen of the Pawnee ambled up, shaking their black and bloody trophies, showing some interest in the white man’s victims. “This bunch will think you’re yellow if’n you don’t scalp them two bodies.”
“Told you,” Hook snarled, pushing away from the old scout. “I don’t want the goddamned scalps.”
“Then I’ll take ’em myself,” Sweete snapped, grimly pushing past the young Confederate.
Jonah watched as the Pawnee scouts closed in a tighter ring while Sweete stopped beside the first body. The old trapper yanked a short knife from his scabbard and kicked the Cheyenne over with the toe of his moccasin. As the young soldier’s eyes widened, the old plainsman pulled the black hair back, set the blade at the brow line, and dragged the knife around, over and behind the ear. Lifting the long, loose hair adorned with feathers, Sweete continued the knife’s path down to the nape of the neck, back up and around the ear to the brow line once more. Wiping the knife off on his buckskin britches, he stood and placed a hand on the back of the warrior’s neck. Tugging carefully at the bloody edges to start the scalp ripping from the skull, the dark skin finally gave way with a sucking pop.
“Here, Jonah—you best hold it for me.”
“I can’t. Told you I won’t.”
“Goddammit!” Sweete growled. “You’ll never hear the end of it from these Pawnee sonsabitches you don’t hold this scalp for me. Leastways, it’ll make ’em think I’m showing you how to scalp even though you don’t want the goddamned thing.” He held it out, shaking some of the gore and blood from it onto the yellow sand. “Now, do it.”
Glancing quickly at the gathering Pawnee, loaded down with their own scalps and plunder, Jonah found a few of them whispering to one another, grinning behind their hands. He burned with resentment.
“Won’t do you no good, son—though you likely feel like punching one of those faces to a bloody pulp.”
“Gimme that scalp!” Hook snapped, surprised that the old man knew how badly he wanted to pummel some of those arrogant faces. “And your knife!”
Sweete handed them over to the Confederate, who promptly turned on the closest tracker who was laughing at him. Stopping almost on the Indian’s toes, Jonah glared into the dark Pawnee eyes, reading the sneer on the tracker’s face. Hook held the scalp up right in the man’s face, then slowly inserted Sweete’s knife blade between the Pawnee’s neck and his long hair, slowly raising the braid with the knife.
The smile on the dark face faded like August snow. The dark eyes widened. Boiling inside, Hook rubbed the knife up and down the Indian’s neck.
“You laugh anymore at me, you bastard—I’ll gut you like a Christmas hog and hang you up to bleed to death,” he snarled.
“I figure he got the gist of your message, Private,” said Major Frank North as he appeared on the scene. “Better you take that knife from his neck now—before one of these others decide that you really do mean to kill Half Rope here.”
He turned to North, not removing the knife. “I would, you know. Half Rope, you call him?”
“He’s a good tracker,” North replied. “Just got him a sense of humor gets him in trouble a lot. But the rest of these are stirred up. Their blood’s hot from the fight—and we found the scalps of a few white men on some of these bodies. Likely from the soldiers killed by the Cheyenne at Platte Bridge a month ago.”
“I was there,” Hook said, not taking his eyes off the dark pools of the Pawnee’s.
“Major’s right about their blood being hot right now, Jonah. Best back off now. You made your point—these boys see the elephant for sure,” Sweete said.
“All right,” Hook eased the knife away, then turned quickly and parted the Pawnee as he strode to the second dead Cheyenne.
There he did as the old trapper had done on the first body, then popped the scalp free, holding them both aloft to the yelps and wild keening of the Pawnee—old enemies of the Cheyenne.
“You satisfied, old friend?” the young Confederate asked of Sweete.
“You’ll do, Jonah Hook. By bloody damn—you’ll do!”
Major North’s Pawnee scouts rode back into Connor’s camp brandishing the fresh, coal black scalps at the end of their coup sticks and from rifle muzzles. They howled like wolves and chanted their war songs. That night they began their ritual dancing around those twenty-four scalps, accompanied by the incessant beating of their small hand drums. The celebration went on for long past midnight and kept so many of the soldiers awake that General Connor had to order North to end the festivities.
For the next six nights, the trackers repeated their noisy dance, ending their celebration, however, by ten each night.
Only a week after that first skirmish with the Cheyenne, the Pawnee reported to Major North they had come across a large trail. North took word of the discovery to Connor.
The next morning, the general detached two companies of Ohio infantry, along with a troop of Seventh Iowa Cavalry, led by both the Pawnee and Omaha scouts. Bringing up the rear of the march was a pair of field pieces—six-pounders. This force would accompany Connor to the Tongue River in search of the migrating hostiles.
Into the rough badlands dividing the Powder River drainage from that of the Tongue, the general marched his trackers and troops. On past the Crazy Woman Fork, drawing ever closer to the bounty land of the Big Horn Mountains, where the men found not only an abund
ance of game, but fat trout as well in those clear-running streams far different from the alkali-tainted creeks in the Powder River country. The long column skirted the west side of a lake surrounded by ocher bluffs brilliant beneath a bright, summer blue sky.
“Water’s unfit to drink—thick with alkali. Years back, during the shining times of the beaver trade,” Sweete explained to Jonah as they rode past the long, narrow body of water, “this lake was named after the first Black Robe to come among the Indians of these northern plains.”
“What’s a Black Robe?”
“A priest. Name of Pierre-Jean De Smet.” Then Sweete laughed, as if enjoying a private joke. “I remember how Gabe used to tell pilgrims heading to Oregon about the thick oil spring you can find on the far side of the lake. Loved to get those pilgrims wide-eyed and gape-mouthed by telling ’em there’s a vein of coal under that lake they could set fire to, and by stirring up the oil and the alkali—make one hell of a batch of soap!”
It was here as well that they came across their first buffalo herds.
That first evening at the base of the foothills, Shad Sweete and a half dozen Pawnee trackers rode out to a nearby herd grazing near Connor’s evening camp and drove fifteen buffalo back toward the soldier’s bivouac, where the huge beasts were killed after they had been driven into a corral made of the expedition’s freight wagons.
“You still got your shooting eye, don’t you, Shad?” commented Jim Bridger as he walked up among the soldiers celebrating and butchering the shaggy buffalo.
“Bet I do, Gabe. Best you dive in now and claim one of them tongues for us—or we’ll be left with poor doings, certain,” Shad replied.
They shared a fat, juicy buffalo tongue that evening, cooked to a rosy, moist pink down in the glowing coals of a fire pit in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains while Bridger told his old partner they would be taking some Pawnee ahead in the morning.
“Leave the Rebel behind this time, Shad.”
Sweete felt something seize up inside him. “Gabe, you and me been friends a long time.”
“We have—and that’s why I figure I can talk straight to you.”
“What stick you got to rub with Jonah?”
“Pawnee and me never did get along.”
“I don’t like ’em particular either, Gabe. What’s that got to do with Hook? Something Connor say to you?”
Bridger gazed at Sweete a moment in the firelight. “You stand by this Rebel?”
“He’ll do to ride the river with, Gabe.”
The old trapper wiped his knife across the top of his leather britches and finally smiled at Sweete. “All right. He’s your’n to worry about. I got enough to do keeping Connor’s balls out of a Lakota sling and his hair from ending up on a Cheyenne lodgepole.”
The next day as the sun rose and then fell, Shad and Bridger led Hook and a handful of the Pawnee north by west from the land of the Pineys, descending at last into the valley of the Tongue. They stopped, waiting a moment to enjoy the view of the Big Horns off to their left, waiting for Bridger and Captain Henry E. Palmer, Connor’s quartermaster, to come up.
“You see what lies along the horizon, yonder?” Sweete asked of the small gathering, his eyes resting a moment longer on the face of his old trapping partner.
While Bridger squinted his blue eyes into the hazy distance, Hook turned to glance behind them at the distant column winding its way through the broken land. Then he looked on up the Tongue, to the northeast among the Wolf Mountains, straining to make out what might be something out of the ordinary.
“Smoke. Plain as paint, Shad,” Bridger answered.
“Smoke?” Palmer asked, a touch of skepticism in his voice. “Where?”
“Look up yonder,” Bridger said. “Far off there between the cut in those hills.”
“Those far hills?” Palmer huffed, sounding incredulous. “That’s a full forty—perhaps as much as fifty miles if it’s a two-day ride for this column.”
“Agreed,” Bridger said. “There’s smoke yonder. Best sign of any we’ve run across, right Shad?”
“Aye, Gabe. A heap of brownskins for sure, Captain Palmer.”
The soldier’s eyes measured the two buckskinned scouts for a tangible moment. “You like to have your fun with me, don’t you, Jim?”
“We ain’t funning you none, Captain.”
Palmer considered it a minute more, then wagged his head. “I’ll go let the general know.”
Minutes later Palmer returned with Connor. The general gazed off to the northeast with his field glasses. After a moment, he wagged his head.
“I can’t make out anything like smoke up there, Bridger.”
Sweete prickled with disgust. “You’re doubting our eyes, General? We’ve both spent two lifetimes out here in these mountains and plains. Smoke’s smoke and Injuns is Injuns.”
Connor turned to North. “Major, take a half dozen of your best trackers and scout in that direction where these two say they spotted the smoke. Report back when you find some positive evidence of the hostiles.”
“Damned paper-collar soldiers,” Bridger grumbled as he reined his horse about angrily.
“What was that, Bridger?” Connor snapped.
Shad straightened in the saddle, angry at the arrogant soldier himself. “He said you and your bunch was nothing more’n paper-collar soldiers.”
“I can tell ’im myself!” Bridger growled at his friend.
“You can, can you, Mr. Bridger?” Connor flared with Irish temper.
“If you go and decide to stop trusting in your scouts—ain’t nothing for Shad and me to do, so we’ll just collect our pay now and be on our way.”
Connor’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not resigning, Bridger. I won’t have it!”
“Then you best start believing what you’re told!”
“Major North will be back in a couple days with some good news—if there’s something up there.”
Across the nearby hills, the shadows were lengthening and coyotes beginning to yip and yammer.
“North’ll find that camp—right where Shad and me say he’ll find it.”
Two days later just past dawn, a pair of the Pawnee came tearing into the soldier camp, bringing back the news Major North had sent to Connor.
A big enemy camp had been located, the trackers explained in sign. Nearby stood Bridger and Sweete, completely vindicated. But there was no apology, nor recognition of the abilities of the white scouts, forthcoming from the general.
“Ask them how many lodges?” Connor asked his chief of scouts.
Bridger wagged his hand at the Pawnee to signify asking a question. With two fingertips he formed a triangle. “Count the lodges.”
The Pawnee pinched his face in thought, then shook his head.
Bridger smiled. “These Pawnee are horse thieves, General. They only count ponies. Ain’t much interested in a count of the lodges.” He turned back to the Indian and signed, “How many ponies?”
“Big herd.”
“That’s enough for me,” Connor replied brusquely, turning to bark orders to his officers, preparing to move out on the attack. “No loud voices, no bugles from here on out. Talking at a minimum, and it must be at a whisper.”
“General, I want to go along,” Palmer requested.
“Captain, you will be in charge of the guard left with your supply train.”
“Begging your pardon, General—I respectfully ask to accompany your assault force. There are several officers who are ill this morning.”
“Ill?”
“Bad water, I suppose, sir. So one of them would gladly stay behind with the train, and I could accompany you.”
Connor wagged his head. “Very well, Palmer. Make it so.”
For the rest of that day and through a night of stumbling struggle, fighting the darkness of that yawning, broken wilderness, Bridger, Sweete, and North led Connor’s troops northeast along the Tongue River. By the first streaks of dawn, North informed the general that his troo
ps were still some distance from the enemy’s village.
“We’ll just have to hurry the troops along,” Connor said. “In the meantime, North, take your scouts ahead and be sure the hostiles don’t bolt on us. Let me know at the first sign that they are fleeing.”
Shad rode with North and Palmer as the Pawnee spread out onto a wide front, carefully picking their way across country. The sun had risen close to midsky before the enemy camp was once more discovered by the scouts inching their way along, staying down in the safety of a streambed, their unshod pony hooves moving quietly on the pebbles beneath the clear surface.
Inexperienced and unaware of the danger, Palmer had allowed his horse to surge ahead of the rest and found himself following a game trail that emerged from a brushy ravine. Suddenly on the flat tableland, Palmer discovered the enemy camp spread before him, a sizable pony herd grazing between him and the lodges. By some stroke of luck, the camp appeared too busy to notice the soldier as he quickly grasped the muzzle of his horse in one hand and reined about, back into the ravine, where he slipped from the saddle.
“I found the camp!” he whispered excitedly as Sweete and North came up.
“Get on back there and tell the general,” North ordered.
Connor quickly issued battle orders to his officers, then formed up two columns before he spoke personally to the enlisted men.
“This is our day! Should we get in close quarters, you men must remember to form by fours and stay together at all costs. Use your rifles as long as possible to defeat our enemy, and under no circumstances are you to use your service revolvers unless you are out of rifle ammunition and have no other choice.”
He took his hat off and swiped a finger inside the headband, preparing to lead the charge himself. “You must endeavor to make every shot count, but each of you must be ever mindful of leaving one shot for yourselves. Rather than fall into the hands of the hostiles, use that last shot for yourself—as it will be preferable to falling into the hands of these savages who have killed up and down the length of Dakota.
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